Table of Contents

National Hospital Discharge Survey, 1974 (ICPSR 9190)

Principal Investigator(s):United States Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics

Summary:

This survey, which is part a continuing sample of hospital
discharge records, supplies medical and demographic information used to
calculate statistics on hospital utilization. The data collection
consists of data abstracted from the face sheets of the medical records
for sampled inpatients discharged from a national sample of nonfederal
short-stay hospitals. The variables include information on the
patient's demographic characteristics (sex, age, date of birth, race,
marital status), dates... (more info)

This survey, which is part a continuing sample of hospital
discharge records, supplies medical and demographic information used to
calculate statistics on hospital utilization. The data collection
consists of data abstracted from the face sheets of the medical records
for sampled inpatients discharged from a national sample of nonfederal
short-stay hospitals. The variables include information on the
patient's demographic characteristics (sex, age, date of birth, race,
marital status), dates of admission and discharge, status at discharge,
diagnoses, procedures performed, source of payment, and hospital
characteristics, such as bedsize, ownership, and region of the country.

Dataset(s)

Study Description

Citation

U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics. NATIONAL HOSPITAL DISCHARGE SURVEY, 1974. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics [producer], 1974. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1989. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09190.v1

Universe:
Patient discharges from short-stay, noninstitutional
hospitals, exclusive of federal hospitals, which were located in the 50
states and the District of Columbia and were included in the National
Master Facility Inventory of Hospitals and Institutions.

Data Types:
clinical data,
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

The data contain ampersands (&), dashes (-), and
blanks.

Methodology

Sample:
All hospitals with 1,000 beds or more in the original
universe of short-stay hospitals were selected with certainty in the
sample. All hospitals with fewer than 1,000 beds were stratified, the
primary stratum depending on size and geographic region. Within each of
these 24 primary strata, the allocation of the hospitals was made
through a controlled selection technique so that hospitals in the
sample would be properly distributed with regard to type of ownership
and geographic division. Sample hospitals were drawn with probabilities
ranging from certainty for the largest hospitals to 1 in 40 for the
smallest hospitals. A total of 426 hospitals in the sample were in
scope and agreed to participate. The within-hospital sampling ratio for
selecting sample discharges varied inversely with the probability of
selection of the hospital. The smallest sampling fraction of discharged
patients was taken in the largest hospitals, and the largest fraction
was taken in the smallest hospitals. In nearly all hospitals, the daily
listing sheet of discharges was the frame from which the subsamples of
discharges were selected within the sample hospitals. The sample
discharges were selected by a random technique, usually on the basis of
the terminal digit(s) of the patient's medical record number--a number
assigned when the patient was admitted. The sample represents 0.7
percent of the estimated 33 million discharges in 1974.